The Internet's global and exponential growth for searching for information sources is common knowledge today. The Internet is implemented using a large variety of connections between millions of computers. The recent developments on information navigation software and user interfaces, such as Netscape Navigator, coupled with a continuously growing number of public access providers are making the Internet a fundamental component of the information age, if not the information super highway itself.
The usage and demands on the network capabilities, however have frustrated many users in attempting to view large bodies of information. Video and high fidelity audio are particularly prone to service degradation. Contention for bandwidth to transport information can delay or fragment the delivery of blocks of information. Large image files can suffer from annoying delay in their delivery and storage and memory capacity of desktop computers and workstations pose limitations to the amount of information that can be downloaded. For example, downloading a five minute video file can take more than sixty minutes, especially when the server from which the video is obtained is located in a distant geographic location, and the user would need very large storage capacity.
In addition to the quality of the received information and storage constraints, the Internet raises other concerns, including a guaranteed or consistent quality of service, security, and an easy and flexible mechanism to charge for transactions.
What is desired is a practical way to provide real time multimedia information, accessed through the Internet or otherwise, to one or more users with a guaranteed quality of service, security, and a charge mechanism for handling service requests made over the Internet. Where multiple users are to receive the information, one client should be able to control the temporal manner according to which the information is to be delivered to the multiple users, whether simultaneously or according to a time delay sequence.